The Extreme Solar Systems II conference is now underway at Jackson Lake with lots of hot new results
Liveblogging: first session is underway, with reviews of discoveries and status of the field from different teams and discovery techniques.
PS: continued for afternoon session in ExSSII: II
PPS: and the second day of the meetins
- Kepler - 1781 candiate planets, up to 27 now confirmed.
Accelerated data release plan with next release on Sep 23.Some very interesting new individual systems.
123 candidates have estimated radii less than 1.25 REarth
121 are in the nominal Habitable Zone, including some super-Earth candidates.
Quarter of candidates are super-Earths.Kepler team pushing very hard for extended mission; nominal
mission now coming to close, discovery rate is accelerating.
No shit.
Extending Kepler to 8 years should be the obvious top priority for the upcoming Senior Review. - Mayor: 55 new planets from their radial velocity search group - CORALIE and HARPS
(Gaiman should really sponsor these guys...)
18 are in press, 37 just being submitted.
19 are super-Earths.Precision on HARPS now down to 0.5 m/sec!
Correcting for incompleteness, they infer very high planet occurrence rates: up to 80-100% depending on how you cut on mass and stellar type etc.
This is significantly different from Kepler - needs to be resolved.Extrapolating implies ηEarth = 0.4 + 0.5 - 0.1
Mayor's group now explicitly rejects Gl 581 f,g exoplanet candidates announced earlier, Bonfils et al (in press) do NOT see these in the extended data.
Correlation of planet occurrence with metallicity goes away for planet masses less than 30 MEarth - for [Z] ~ -1 -- 0.3 Still there for giant planets.
Interesting conjecture on occurrence rate discrepancy due to large number of dense super-Earths, high metal content planets, show up in RV searches but not transits.
They are developing a lasercomb for calibration, think they can get down to 2.5 cm/sec.
(Ours should be as good...)
Interesting development of octagonal fibers giving smoother illumination and less fiber jitter, that one was new to me. - Taka Sumi on microlensing
Seeing good sample of wide ( > 2 AU) bound planets.
Still claiming many free-floaters or very wide orbit planets - 2 free jupiters per star...Puzzling, conceivable, but implies a lot of planet scattering - back to "Last of the Mohicans" scenarios of planet formation?
Their inferred occurrence is high, consistent with Mayor, not Kepler.
They are sensitive to mass, not radii. - Kalas: Direct imaging
Getting there, GPI and extreme adaptive optics likely to lead to progress,
Fomalhaut b looking worrying, something there, but what.
β Pic and HR8799 looking robust. - People are extending and revising results on the fly - running data reduction pipelines overnight.
Conference room is packed, nobody getting out there to hike or sightsee today; very fast paced conference. - C. Lovis - good talk on subtle effects to correct for looking for low mass planets in RV searches.
Poster has subtle hints about search for low mass planets around α Cen
Will check - FIsher also looking at α Cen - ought to see something soon if there is anything in the system.---
- Missed a couple of talks
- Niedzsielski - RV searches around intermediate mass stars/giants
Inconsistent [Z] correlation
Planet engulfment inside 0.6 AU
Higher occurrence of planets around massive stars
10 new planets; 17 total in survey to date. Long period giatn planets - Osterman - lasercomb
NIST near-IR lasercomb. H-band
AWESOME!Precise to part in 1019 in principle,
achieve 1 part in 1011 in field with GPS cross-calibration, long term stable.
Implemented on PATHFINDER spectrograph at HET telescope. 8 days continuous operation on first run.
Stable to 0.3 cm/sec!!!Problem with modal speckle noise - needs improved scrambling for uniform illumination
Change bands to Y-band - Mahadevan - Pathfinder near-IR spectrograph on HET - calibration and results
Fiber fed spectrograph.
Switch to U-Ne instead of Th-Ar for calibration, much better (cf Redman et al 2011)
Done a near-IR run with lasercomb - works spectacularly
Photon limited, thermal noise, modal noise (see above).Moving ahead with full LN2 cooled science grade spectrograph and lasercomb in a box, contingent on funding, of course. - Habitable Zone Planet Finder - RV on earth mass planets around low mass red stars.
This should be an interesting few days.
400 exoplanet researchers packed into a remote lodge with almost no internet access and many hot competing new results...
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Hmm, I thought Paul recovered Fomalhaut b with STIS in the past year. Is the worry still about the object's orbit/astrometric calibration of their data?
Yeah STIS coronograph picked it up, be good to get 4th epoch.
Orbit is looking funky, implies most likely another planet
Could be planet-planet scattering in progress I suppose.
Also some anomalous magnitude variation - actually didn't see variable obscuration as explanation - be interesting to see if a dust clump interior to planet could have shadowed it at second epoch causing brightness variation...
In fact I like that as an explanation - wonder if you could see it in the disk looking at visible structure interior to know planet positions.
You should be here dood.
Brad says "Hi"
Thanks for live blogging during this interesting workshop.
@Steinn: Yes, yes, I know I should be there. This summer was a bit chaotic and I missed the deadline, unfortunately. This post reminds me, though, that I should actually figure out what's going on with my own Fomalhaut data!
6 Earth-Size planets candidates found by Kepler around M-Dwarf star habitable zones!
the candidates:
KOI 463.01
KOI 1422.02
KOI 947.01
KOI 812.03
KOI 448.02
KOI 1361.01
Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Low-Mass Kepler Planet-Candidate Host Stars: Effective Temperatures, Metallicities, Masses and Radii
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1819
We report stellar parameters for low-mass planet-candidate host stars recently announced by the Kepler Mission. We obtained medium-resolution, K-band spectra of 84 low-mass Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs). We identified one KOI as a giant; for the remaining dwarfs, we estimated effective temperatures by comparing measurements of K-band regions dominated by H2O opacity with predictions of synthetic spectra for low-mass stars. We measured overall metallicities ([M/H]) using the equivalent widths of Na I and Ca I absorption features and an empirical metallicity relation calibrated with nearby stars. With effective temperatures and metallicities, we estimate the masses and radii of the low-mass KOIs by interpolation onto evolutionary isochrones. The resultant stellar radii are roughly half of the values reported in the Kepler Input Catalogue and, by construction, correlate better with effective temperature. Our results significantly reduce the sizes of the corresponding planet-candidates, with many less than 1 Earth radius. Recalculating the equilibrium temperatures of the planet-candidates from the implied stellar luminosities and masses, and assuming Earthâs albedo and re-radiation fraction, we find that six of the planet-candidates are terrestrial-sized with orbital semi-major axes that lie within the habitable zones of their low-mass host stars. The stellar parameters presented in this letter serve as a resource for further characterization of the planet-candidates.
Thank you so much for that. This is beyond cool.
Vela , isn't that the system announced in the movie with Jodie Foster when she transposed through the module that was built and she traveled through time to visit and come back , so there is a way to speed up a space shuttle without adding additional fuels or worrying about replentishing the spent fuels and to increase the speed of a voyaging vehicle say 2 , 3 how about 6 times the norm of theusual 27,000 miles / hour that a shuttle speeds around the earth now and thus be slung into outter space to travel
Thank you for this, I (layman here) was only becoming aware of the HARPS/Kepler discrepancy as of yesterday, and this drove it home beautifully.
Assuming you can resolve that, why else mention it, as I am sure you are aware of 0.003 m/s is somewhat slower than a snail that puts the pedal to the metal:
"...
Snail's Pace, Last Word, New Scientist, October 2001.
"Snails have been measured at speeds of 0.048 kilometres per hour."
0.013 m/s
"The fastest speed achieved by a snail in the Guinness Gastropod Championship, held over a 13-inch (330-millimetre) course in the O'Conor Don pub in central London, is only 0.0085 kilometres per hour. This record is held by a mollusc called Archie, which took 2 minutes and 20 seconds to cover the course."
0.0024 m/s
"During a series of experiments involving the marine gastropod Gibbula umbilicalis, I measured a mean speed of 0.0065 kilometres per hour when it was in the presence of a predatory starfish, Asterias rubens."
0.0018 m/s
As It Happened 1975: Snail Racer [Real Media File]. Interview with Chris Hudson of Brighton, England by Barbara Frum. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 1975.
"Well, the fastest snail that I've ever had covered a two foot course, which is a standard course for a snail race ⦠in some three minutes flat. Now any mathematicians listening to the program will realize straight away that works out at 132 hours to travel a full mile."
0.0034 m/s
..."
Give or take that this is all anecdotal 'information', of course.
How do you mean funky? Does it go through the debris ring or something? And is the idea that it is a low-mass planet surrounded by an irregular satellite collision swarm actually viable?